Hexy Bitch

by Daisy May Cooper

Genres: Ghost

Synopsis

For as long as Daisy May Cooper can remember, she's been fascinated with the unexplained. Ghosts, spirits, tea leaves, astrological charts, paranormal activity - you name it, she's been obsessed!

In her hilarious new book, Daisy sets out to probe the otherworldly and investigate how her own experiences with forces we can't explain have influenced all parts of her life.

Armed with an open mind and ghost-hunting equipment from the dark web, she explores haunted houses, interrogates experts who claim they can communicate with the other side, reveals a brush with paganism that turned out to be a front for swinging, and digs in to her own spooky side.

It's like 'Scooby-Doo' meets 'Mystic Meg', via a portal to the afterlife in the back room of an Oxfordshire pub.

Containing stories that will make your hair stand on end, and some that will make you do a bit of wee with laughter... it's time to embrace the eerie, welcome in the weird and celebrate the spiritual.

Things are about to get HEXY, b*tch.

Release date: October 24, 2024

Publisher: Octopus

Print pages: 320

Sample

The Bates Motel, where its famous inhabitant Norman Bates took on the terrifying alter ego of his dead mother in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

The Overlook Hotel where Jack Nicholson stalked the corridors in The Shining, announcing, ‘Here’s Johnny!’ in one blood-curdling moment when the deranged writer peered through a hole in the bathroom door that he’d carved with an axe.

The all-American white picket-fence house where demonic spirits were unleashed to create the spine-chilling movie The Amityville Horror.

A new build in South Cerney, 20 minutes’ drive from Swindon and a stone’s throw from Birdland Park and Gardens near Cotswold Water Park – one of the Cotswolds’ finest tourist attractions. This example doesn’t quite have the same effect does it? Yet it’s what I’ve come to know as a haunted house – my house – my haunted house.

I first told the story of my house on the radio series and podcast Uncanny, presented by Danny Robins for the BBC. Doing so felt very surreal. Eventually putting into words all that had happened in that house suddenly transformed a sequence of random, unexplained events into something real, something tangible. Now it wasn’t just the figment of mine or anyone else’s imagination. I was telling it to the world and it felt good, really good. Therapeutic, even.

It had all started with some vague sightings by others. Debs, my short, dumpy, fifty-something, batshit-crazy cleaner at the time, had spent months reporting that a highwayman frequently walked through my wardrobe in the hallway, across the kitchen, through the patio doors and into the garden. ‘He’s polite. Always doffs his cap, Daisy,’ she told me before reminding me that I’d run out of toilet roll. He did sound like the perfect gentleman, but I’d never set eyes on him. I logged on to Amazon straight away, ordered up a 24-roll multipack of quilted bog roll and thought about the highwayman fleetingly before he cantered off into the recess of my mind.

Another time Debs claimed a Roman in full battle gear was hovering near the utility room.

‘Wait there, Dais,’ she said, pointing a bright pink rubber-gloved finger in my direction.

‘What is it, Debs?’ I stood frozen on the spot. Was it a wasp, a bee, the terrifying sight of my fake tan gone wrong?

‘There’s a Roman. On your shoulder, three o’clock, Dais.’

My first instinct was to swat him like a bluebottle, but Debs stopped me.

‘No, Dais, he means no harm. He’s just passing through.’

I didn’t sense a thing. Debs also claimed to be a medium – she said she had special powers. But a lot of people say that, don’t they? One read of Sally Morgan’s My Psychic Life and suddenly they’re channelling Queen Victoria.

Once, she reckoned that there had been a hangman’s tree directly outside my bedroom window. According to her, hundreds had been executed there. After some thought I dismissed this as a passive-aggressive attempt to tell me off for repeatedly leaving my knickers sunny side up on the bathroom floor. Classic Debs. Or maybe it was because I hadn’t put her wages up? Of course, I did want to believe my house was some kind of portal. I really did. It would be the proof I’d been waiting for – the evidence that spirits are all around us and we just need to tune into their frequency. But nothing ever appeared for me. Besides, it’s really fucking hard to take anyone seriously when they turn up at your house wearing a moth-eaten brown woollen hat pulled down over their ears, a shiny green puffer jacket that made Debs look like the Incredible Hulk and clutching a can of Mr Muscle Platinum kitchen spray. If anything was going to come back and bother the living, would it seriously make a beeline for Debs?

Then my friend Sarah came to stay. Sarah is a police officer – she deals in cold, hard evidence every single day. Even on an off day she can look like Detective Inspector Kate Fleming from Line of Duty chasing down an armed gang leader. Fear is not in her feelings vocabulary. She’s also a massive sceptic. That night we ate a Chinese takeaway and downed a few glasses of wine. Sarah slept on the top floor of my home in the bedroom where I usually put guests (it was a three-storey house and my bedroom was on the middle floor), but when she came downstairs the next morning I noticed she looked pallid, rubbing her eyes like she’d barely slept a wink.

‘Hiya!’ I shouted over. ‘Got a hangover? Fuck me, I feel like shit.’

‘No … Is everything okay, Daisy?’ she asked hesitantly.

‘Yeah, want some crumpets?’

‘No, Dais, I mean … is everything okay ?’

‘Yeah, sure. What do you want on them … Butter? Or jam?’

I’ve never been very good at picking up on foreboding. The conversation really did need some tinkly background music.

‘Was the kitchen as we left it last night?’

‘Yeah …’

Sarah dragged out a stool, climbed on it then cradled her head in her hands on the breakfast bar. Then, I started to feel very anxious. The poor woman was trembling.

‘What’s the matter, Sarah?’

‘This house. It was broken into last night. I heard it. There were sounds like saucepans hitting the floor. When I edged out on to the stairwell, I heard voices. Loud voices. Then, wafting up from downstairs was the smell of cigarette smoke.’

‘Why didn’t you wake me?’

‘I was petrified, Dais,’ she admitted.

Apparently, Sarah had been on the verge of calling the police, which is strange because she is the police, so in my mind, she must have been bloody terrified! But then, everything went quiet.

‘Nothing’s happened here,’ I said, gazing around the room confusedly.

‘So … nothing had been moved when you came down this morning?’

‘Nothing,’ I replied, but when my eyes locked on Sarah’s I knew that she wasn’t bullshitting. For most of that morning we tried to figure out what she’d heard. My house was detached and overlooking a large lake, so it definitely couldn’t have been the neighbours.

‘Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?’ I asked her for the umpteenth time.

‘Positive,’ Sarah muttered.

Both of us took a deep breath and stared into our mugs of tea. After an hour or so it felt like we’d run out of rational explanations.

‘Do you know what I think?’ I said wearily. Suddenly, I was faced with the possibility that Debs may not be telling massive porkies after all, although I did still think that she used the paranormal just to be a spiteful cow.

‘What’s that?’ Sarah looked up quizzically.

‘This house is bloody haunted.’ I grimaced.



Nothing happened for a few months after that, not until my friend Selin turned up. We’d just started writing the BBC series Am I Being Unreasonable? together but I’d known Selin since we were at RADA more than a decade before. She often took the piss out of my obsession with the paranormal. I seem to recall she’d used the words ‘absolute bollocks’ in the past. Quite frequently, actually. Yet that night, when Selin stayed with her partner in the same room as Sarah had, she crossed over from being an evangelical non-believer into a what I would call para-curious. And let me tell you, it was an absolute fucking joy to witness.

Normally, Selin sleeps with earplugs in, to shut out the sound of her partner’s loud snoring. But not long after her head hit the pillow, she woke up to a strange hissing noise in her ear.

‘Psssss … psssss … psssss.’

Then, she felt her partner’s hand shake her gently. ‘Did you hear that whispering noise?’ he asked her.

Both of them had heard it, although neither could work out what the voice said, where it was coming from or what it might be trying to tell them.

On another occasion, when Selin came to my house alone, she swore blind she’d heard dogs barking in my downstairs living room. I do not have dogs. She listened from the very same bedroom and, like Sarah, hovered on the stairwell. The next morning, she burst into my room.

‘D’you know what? I think you’re right, Daisy,’ she cried.

‘I am right about most things … what’s the latest?’ I answered, rather smugly.

‘This house is bloody haunted.’



By then, though, all sorts of peculiar activity had been unleashed. There were nights when I’d been sitting alone downstairs watching a true crime story on Netflix when I swore I heard the faint sound of running water. I turned the sound down and listened more closely. As I got up and slowly climbed the stairs, the sound got louder … and louder. When I peered around my bathroom door I found the shower tap on full blast with the water gushing. Could I have forgotten to switch it off? I didn’t think so. It was a stiff mock-Victorian handle that I had to squeeze shut.

On the landing, two large canvas paintings that I’d recently bought had also been taken down. First they’d been placed leaning neatly against the wall by the stairs. Another time, they were put near the entrance to my daughter’s bedroom. It had taken a stepladder to hang them, so the idea that someone could have reached up overnight and moved them was absurd. Even Debs denied trying to dust them.

‘I draw the line at the paintings, Dais. Vertigo gets me every time.’

There were other unsettling audible moments, too. I’d started to hear heavy footsteps on the stairs, casually making their way up to the top floor. Whereas at first I gulped hard with fear, I tried to remain open-minded. And these bumps in the (day and) night began happening so frequently that the noises started to blend into the fabric of my everyday existence.

Whenever I searched, no one was there. I tried to inject some calm into the situation: whoever or whatever this was didn’t seem to want to threaten me or hurt me, so why should I give it a hard time? Could we live peaceably together in some kind of Buddhist fantasy? I wondered. What would the Dalai Lama say? By harming it, would I ultimately harm myself?

This brought on a massive existential crisis that I had not predicted at all. On balance, though, all these stuck taps meant the water bill was reaching unmanageable levels, especially as I was on a water meter, but perhaps that was a small price to pay. Then, I spotted an opportunity. At last, I could conduct my very own paranormal investigation. Right there, in my own home. By a process of elimination, I could solve this mystery like a slightly sexier Miss Marple.

The activity kept me on my toes for months. Even my dad Paul – by far the toughest audience when it comes to the paranormal – had experienced something. He had been standing by the French windows looking out on to the lake when he’d seen a man, probably in his early fifties, well-to-do and sporting a moustache. He strolled by the hot tub wearing a tweed coat, seemingly from a bygone era.

‘Daisy!’ Dad called me outside. ‘Was anyone coming to fix the hot tub today?’

‘It’s not broken … why?’

‘There was a man standing by it a moment ago …’

I thought about this for a nanosecond. No one was due to check anything.

‘Are you sure it wasn’t a nutbag fan?’ I asked.

‘Don’t think so, Dais. Looked more like aristocracy. I’ve met the fans, remember …’

Dad was right. No one had ever turned up at a Q & A or a book or DVD signing dressed like that. And believe me, I’ve seen some fucking mental sights … like the guy who came to one event dressed as a stuffed Dalek scarecrow. He had a wicker basket on his head and arrived holding two solar-powered garden pathway lights as arms. I couldn’t fault him for the effort he’d put in.

And, no offence, most fans are lovely, but since the success of This Country I have been confronted with some truly alarming things. One morning I pirouetted downstairs and flung open my curtains with joyful abandon. I felt the warmth of the bright sunlight hit my face and gazed out at the lakeside vista. Fuck me, there was a random bloke squatting on my back lawn. I locked eyes with him. He stared back. He was grinning wildly, giving me the thumbs up while the grass tickled his fat arse cheeks. His cacks were around his ankles. The full horror took seconds to sink in. Is he …? Is he …? Oh fuck … he is … My mouth dropped. There was a fully-grown human curling out a massive turd on my lawn while I stood helpless in my pyjamas. With the lightning speed of an ageing Premiership goalkeeper I leaped to cover my daughter Pip’s face with my hands. No four-year-old needs to be met with that head on at 7am on a Tuesday morning. It could scar someone for life.

For that reason, I’d employed a security firm to check around the property every hour. They had the key to the only entrance to the back garden – a gate that remained padlocked. When I called them on the afternoon of Dad’s sighting, there was nothing in their logbook to suggest anyone had been spotted sniffing around.

‘Did the man by the hot tub seem dangerous?’ I asked Dad, just to make sure.

‘No, he just sauntered past, like he lived here,’ Dad said, with a shrug.

Dad never saw that man again. Neither did anyone else, but I was starting to build a theory. Several, in fact. What if this wasn’t evidence of the past undead, exactly? What if these noises – these sightings – were just another family living in a parallel universe? A bit like when I once recorded an episode of Poirot on VHS tape but, when I watched it back, scenes from Blue Peter that hadn’t been properly erased flickered through. The competing storylines were insane, as if two realities were interwoven and Konnie Huq was now trying to solve the brutal murder of a wealthy recluse in the Blue Peter garden with Mabel the dog as the prime suspect.

I’d read articles about this kind of phenomena, too. None of it was simple. There’s one school of thought that believes these kinds of experiences could be the result of two time dimensions bleeding into one another: that we live in parallel universes where gazillions of alternate realities rub up against each other like pissed-up teenagers at a foam party.

Many have reported similar time slips. Some of the most well-documented cases come from Liverpool, one hotspot being part of its main shopping area, Bold Street. In 1996, one paranormal expert interviewed an off-duty policeman who described in such precise detail what had happened when he and his wife had gone shopping. At the moment they parted, agreeing to meet up later, he suddenly found himself stepping into the 1950s. Box van vehicles sped past him. Men strolled by wearing trilby hats and long overcoats and the women had on pillbox hats, scarves and gloves. Yet at other moments a girl appeared wearing hipster jeans and a lime green T-shirt and carrying a Miss Selfridge bag, like she’d got hopelessly lost on the set of Call the Midwife. Two worlds tuning in and out of each other like an old analogue radio. How fucking bizarre is that?

Another famous account dates back to the 1970s when two English couples set off on a road trip through south-eastern France. At the bed and breakfast they stayed at they ate breakfast alongside two French police officers dressed as if they were from the 1900s. There was also a woman in a silk evening gown carrying a small dog under her arm. Everything seemed to be from another era, including the price: the equivalent of around £2.50 for four people. Absolute fucking bargain! No wonder they headed straight back when they passed through again a few weeks later. This time, though, when they turned into the cobbled lane to find the building, it had completely vanished. No one they asked knew of it. I mean, what business could keep going on those prices? Especially when the Novotel down the road was charging £250. But even more mysterious were the photographs they took while they were staying there. Those very pictures had disappeared off the roll of film when it came back from being developed. It remains a completely unsolved case. Spooky as fuck.

On the day I lay in bed watching a pair of disembodied legs run around my bedroom – the culmination of months of unnatural goings-on – I thought hard about this time slip theory. The little boy; the man by the hot tub; the dog barking; the noise of pots and pans; the shower turning on. Good grief, was this evidence of others taking up residence in my house? Just going about their business? Bumping up against my life? And if so, why did the fuckers never go to Tesco and fill up the fridge? And I never woke to find a random turd floating in the toilet, either. The sort that happens in every single household, an oversized number two that everyone denies is theirs and needs a tsunami of water to flush down.

But there’s another theory, too. A theory that suggests we may not always be haunted by ghosts of the past; instead we can be visited by phantoms of the future. According to the theory of hauntology – which asks whether people can be haunted by ghosts of lost futures – these are ghosts that turn up to remind us of all the things we never did, but always wanted to. They can dig into our deepest, darkest regrets (in my case, never having snogged, shagged or married Ben Shephard) or shine a light on our unfulfilled desires (erm … sorry … Ben Shephard again!).

So were these more intelligent beings trying to communicate something to me about my life? In my career, I’d achieved a lot. After years and years of trying, and failing, to get This Country off the ground, Charlie and I had bloody done it. My acting and writing career had finally got lift-off. There were four BAFTAS lined up on my sideboard. Four fucking BAFTAs! (Though, the least said about the boring-as-shit ceremony I had to sit through the better.) Now I was writing a prime-time sitcom with my best friend Selin. Yes! Yes! Yes! Career-wise, life couldn’t get any better.

On the other hand, my two-year marriage to my husband Will had hit the skids. Although we’d been separated for a while I was still filled with all the painful rage of feeling trapped inside a miserable relationship, trying to salvage any shred of confidence I had left in myself. Plus we have two children together. Everything felt like such a complicated mess. And now, potentially, here to tell me what an abysmal human being I’d become was a perfect nuclear family living alongside me, flaunting their 2.4 ordinariness in my face, enjoying themselves in my hot tub and using my bedroom as a sports circuit, cooking up family dinners at fuck knows what hour their time. Was this family punishing me? Or trying to tell me that happier days were just round the corner? Had they even noticed me and my pathetic life? It was time for my investigation to go deeper …



How the hell could a new build in South Cerney be haunted? Churches are haunted, graveyards and cemeteries too. Hospitals, care homes and former asylums are practically all-night raves for the recently departed. But a suburban house surrounded by mainly holiday homes on the edge of a water park? Doesn’t seem likely. Also, I was the first ever inhabitant of that house. As far as I knew no one had shuffled off this mortal coil in my downstairs loo, not even an electrician or a builder. And the top floor bedroom, where most of the paranormal activity had been reported, was covered floor to ceiling in tropical palm wallpaper for fuck’s sake. Was the spirit world flocking there in the vague hope it would be hotter in winter? A staycation that was a helluva lot cheaper than a last-minute package holiday to Fuerteventura? I was about to find out …

They say that the truth is stranger than fiction and so it has come to pass. I was focusing my investigations on the four walls of my house because it didn’t occur to me for a single moment that the land around me or the water park itself were any kind of hangout for the undead. Not long after I agreed to tell my story on Uncanny, its research team began digging. Over a period of a few weeks it uncovered facts about the area that I had zero clue about.

I’d only ever known of one tragedy in the area. It was seared into my brain because I was a teen when it happened. A local florist had been found dead in the lake along with her young daughter. It was bloody heartbreaking. The woman had become convinced that her disabled daughter’s condition was due to metal poisoning, rather than her having cerebral palsy. In fact, she believed the whole world was being poisoned by metal. To treat her daughter, she gave her healing baths using massage oil. One day, she was giving her a bath in olive oil when her daughter accidentally drowned. From her home, the woman took her lifeless body to the lake. Holding her, she walked in and drowned he. . .